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News About Tech, Money and InnovationTue, 03 Mar 2015 23:18:34 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Copyright 2015, VentureBeatWhy open-source cloud builder Cloud Foundry is about to get more popularhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/02/23/why-open-source-cloud-builder-cloud-foundry-is-about-to-get-more-popular/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/23/why-open-source-cloud-builder-cloud-foundry-is-about-to-get-more-popular/#commentsMon, 24 Feb 2014 05:01:19 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=969676Pivotal, HP, IBM, Rackspace, and other companies will start a foundation for the open-source platform-as-a-service Cloud Foundry, which could help the project get more adoption.
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Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud-computing project for quickly building and running applications, could become a lot more popular in the months to come. That’s because it won’t be under the rule of a single company anymore.

Today Pivotal, Cloud Foundry‘s “steward,” announced that it will work with a bunch of other big technology companies to launch the Cloud Foundry Foundation, effectively letting more people decide the direction of the project.

EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Rackspace, SAP, and VMware are on board with Pivotal as founding platinum sponsors of the project, meaning they’ll put money toward the development of the new organization. ActiveState and CenturyLink are also founding sponsors, with a “gold” level of participation. EMC and its subsidiary VMware gave birth to Pivotal, but the lineup of participating companies is nonetheless impressive.

“The truth is, these companies really like the technology, and they see a lot of customers demanding it right now, and they wanted it, and we needed to give them a seat at the table,” James Watters, Pivotal’s head of product, marketing, and ecosystem for Cloud Foundry, told VentureBeat.

The companies have contributed code to the open-source project, too. Now they’ll have the security of knowing they’ll have more control over the future of the project, which VMware began in 2011.

When Pivotal spun out of VMware and EMC, Cloud Foundry was a core part of the Pivotal portfolio. In November Pivotal announced Pivotal One, which includes a commercially supported version of Cloud Foundry alongside tools to store and process lots of different kinds of data. Pivotal also runs a Cloud Foundry-based public cloud, Pivotal Web Services.

At its core, Cloud Foundry is code that makes servers able to accept and deploy developers’ software applications. Cloud Foundry accepts apps written in many languages and application frameworks. With Cloud Foundry, companies can implement a service sort of like the popular Heroku platform as a service in their own private data centers. Except unlike Heroku, Cloud Foundry is available under an open-source Apache license.

Baidu, Intel, and Rakuten are among the companies that use Cloud Foundry to run their businesses. NTT and Verizon use Cloud Foundry to offer cloud services to their own customers.

With more people calling the shots for Cloud Foundry under the new foundation, the technology could become appealing to more companies, Watters said. And now the companies that have contributed to Cloud Foundry could feel more prepared to launch lots of products based on the technology.

Cloud Foundry isn’t the only open-source platform-as-a-service project out there. Others include Red Hat’s OpenShift and Flynn. The new foundation could help Cloud Foundry stand out more.

Earlier this week, Pivotal made headlines when it released a commercially supported version of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (or PaaS) for building and running applications. In the same breath, the company announced supported services to store and analyze large quantities of data.

Vendors don’t typically launch major cloud-computing and big data products on the same day; it’s usually one area or the other. But Pivotal executives see data analytics as a valuable resource for running applications, and they think querying data should be just a few steps away from the management of a cloud, not in a whole other universe. And that mindset helps Pivotal stand out in the PaaS market as well as the data market.

To learn more about the merger of cloud tech and data science, we talked to Todd Paoletti, Pivotal’s vice president of product marketing. He discussed how far along data science is inside enterprises, how easy it is to create a repository of data that you can process, and how developers can use analytics to turn out better applications.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

VentureBeat: What made you guys want to roll out big data services plus commercially supported PaaS together? Why are they coupled like this?

Todd Paoletti: Well, the PaaS is extremely valuable in its own right, because Pivotal still is very much about choice, being able to run your application, your environment, your workloads in the cloud of your choice, being able to leverage the development environments of your choice, etc. So Pivotal CF is extremely valuable in its own right for those purposes — collapsing the time to value for deploying applications on a variety of clouds or systems.

But the Pivotal One data services are accessible and integrated within that environment. We are getting customers closer to the time-to-value notion, effectively within the construct of Pivotal CF. A handful of clicks will enable a user to set up a big data cluster. A few more clicks will enable the same customer to begin running analytics and leveraging data in that cluster or analytics that are overseeing applications that are stood up on that cluster, to get value out of it. We see those services as really important value-adds for the dev-ops team in the enterprise, but these are also really important from the spirit of helping the enterprise get to value more rapidly through services that are right there on the screen for them.

VentureBeat: Is it really possible to set up a Hadoop cluster with a few clicks?

Paoletti: It is, I would say, in spirit, a few clicks. In a demo, you can see a Pivotal interface. Presented in the interface are service tiles that represent these Pivotal One data services as optional service tiles, and from there the installation and deployment of those services essentially act as any other application that’s being installed and deployed by the PaaS.

VentureBeat: How easy is it from there?

Paoletti: Well, that’s the value of the PaaS in and of itself. I mean, effectively, we are creating an environment, a framework, for a dev-ops team or an operations team to manage installations, manage workloads, provision applications, deploy, scale up, and scale down entirely through a controlled environment, and we take what could take weeks down to days or hours, depending on the application.

Editor’s note: Our upcoming DataBeat/Data Science Summit, Dec. 4-Dec. 5 in Redwood City, will focus on the most compelling opportunities for businesses in the area of big data analytics and data science. Register today!

VentureBeat: Are companies actually showing interest in paying for both the PaaS and the data services?

Paoletti: Three days ago, it was the first time we actually had available or announced a commercial version of the on-premise PaaS system. Time will tell if we got it right. I will say that our customers have been asking for this kind of capability for a while, so we think we’ve got it right.

VentureBeat: What if companies can’t think of good questions to ask even if they want to analyze data?

Paoletti: Well, then we wouldn’t recommend that they buy the service, honestly. It doesn’t help us if someone doesn’t get use out and value out of a service of the gate. If the customer knows what they want out of big data, they’re going to be down a maturity curve with the software we’re providing them. We’ll absolutely help in and of itself if they are in a phase where they are trying to get value of big data. That’s where our elite-level data science labs organization comes into play.

That team is one of the most sought-after teams within the company, and effectively, they go into an organization that says, “We know we need to get value out of big data,” or “We’re capturing it, but we’re trying to understand how to convert that valuable data into insight and analysis.”

That’s what the team is designed to do, and that’s what they do very, very effectively.

VentureBeat: Do you find that companies already employ data scientists?

Paoletti: The notion of data science, if you look at the history of that world, is relatively new, and so there are not that many data scientists out there. There are not enough data scientists to go around, which is why our team is in high demand. Not every enterprise has a data science team. They are more times than not small. But they are growing.

VentureBeat: Are you seeing that developers of the applications that can run on the PaaS want to ask data science questions?

Paoletti: We are, and I think it’s a combination of algorithmic data and application development — what we call data-driven applications. It’s what Google does really, really well and what Facebook does really, really well. They see algorithmic updates in real-time data, so that the app behaves with input from big data. One use case is to help protect against fraud. Another use case is making purchase recommendations through pattern recognition on buying patterns. That’s what Amazon does really well.

VentureBeat: How confident are you that other PaaS sellers will stick their own data services on top of PaaSes, instead of separate from or next to them?

Paoletti: If they do it right, they will, in part because we’re seeing that customers want these things together.

VentureBeat: What will Pivotal come up with next on the data side?

Paoletti: Well, we’re going to continue to invest in advanced systems and tools that run across our overall stack, and we will continue to invest in integrating those components of our data stack together, so that companies can use everything more effectively.

From massively parallel database technology to Hadoop subsystems to predictive analytics, and Hadoop for the purpose of real-time applications — those advances we’ve made already. You can imagine we’re going to continue to invest in the most cost-effective, flexible, and advanced data architecture to help support the rapid development of big data apps and big data analytics.

VentureBeat: Which do you think are more in demand: data services like those introduced this week, or the commercially supported Pivotal CF?

Paoletti: I think the trend is that this stuff is going to be really, really important. I can’t give you a concrete answer. We’ll see how the uptick goes. What I will say is — look at the enterprise adoption of cloud services, infrastructure services, platform services — like an IDC report or a Gartner report. There’s massive acceleration in that space. Cloud Foundry and Pivotal CF will participate in those growth cycles.

Separately, if you were to look at an IDC or Gartner report, our data services are going to participate and hopefully exceed growth from those markets independently.

So the big growth in cloud utilization and cloud platform adoption absolutely will be big growth for Pivotal CF. Big growth in big data will be big growth for Pivotal One. We believe the combination and the intersection of those two will help us accelerate both even faster than those markets are accelerating, if that makes sense.

To be pithy about it, you can eat peanut butter without chocolate, and you can eat chocolate without peanut butter. There’s a market for them that are discrete, but some people would argue they’re better together.

But the value of the PaaS system improves with the number of data clusters that are accessed by it and managed by it. The ease of managing applications and managing Hadoop clusters on top of that through the PaaS will perpetuate the adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise. So we think that they are symbiotic, but they do not necessarily have to be sold together or consumed together.

Pivotal, that joint initiative by VMware and EMC to find emerging opportunities in big data and cloud application platforms, today released its enterprise version of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform as a service for easily building and deploying applications.

But these days, announcing that you’re offering a platform as a service, or PaaS, and providing premium support isn’t really a big deal. Pivotal’s PaaS stands out because it’s the foundation for services that let companies bring in, store, query, and analyze large amounts of data. Those additional services fall under the corporate banner Pivotal One.

The combined Pivotal One and enterprise Cloud Foundry release is a major rollout for Pivotal. The new products amount to a central hub for the company, to which many of its other services can be connected — whether it’s middleware, web and application servers, an application development framework, or big data consulting services. It isn’t just another addition to the Pivotal lineup; it can be what binds other pieces together. And it makes Pivotal into more of a platform provider than a vendor of piecemeal application and data services.

The starting point for all this is Pivotal CF, as the Pivotal people call their enterprise-focused flavor of Cloud Foundry. The distribution can run on-premise or in a cloud somewhere else, said Dave Menninger, Pivotal’s head of business development and strategy.

“A lot of organizations might want to do development and testing in a public cloud environment, but … I think it’s probably fair to say, still, in the majority of instances, organizations want to deploy some sort of private cloud infrastructure, not in a public cloud infrastructure, for production workloads,” Menninger said.

The offering falls in line with other vendor moves in recent months to provide on-premise PaaS. Red Hat got OpenShift running on-premise last November, and Google has taken steps to let companies run a version of the Google App Engine on their own internal servers instead of on Google’s infrastructure.

While Pivotal was partly born of VMware employees and of technology the virtualization giant acquired, Pivotal isn’t completely biased toward VMware. Customers of Pivotal CF aren’t forced to use VMware’s infrastructure as a service if they want to run the Pivotal cloud. “We are software providers, so we are providing software that can be used with EMC and VMware infrastructure, or with others’ infrastructure,” Menninger said.

Pivotal stands to gain from the enterprise distribution of Cloud Foundry by offering support for its customers’ deployments. And it will do the same thing through the tools it’s providing to run on top of Cloud Foundry.

Those tools include the Pivotal distribution of Hadoop for storing and querying data; Pivotal AX analytics programs courtesy of VMware’s 2012 Cetas acquisition to
analyze and visualize data; RabbitMQ for moving data from one application to another; and a standard MySQL database service to house relational data.

The list of programs that will run atop Pivotal CF will only grow, Menninger said.

Delivering such tools for going through huge sets of data alongside the PaaS for running applications is more than a clever attempt to make people say “cloud” and “big data” in the same sentence. It shows Pivotal believes it’s only natural to want to quickly bring in new data and analyze it through a single source — instead of having one stack for production applications and another for big data analytics.

“The value proposition is that you have one set of infrastructure that you manage,” Menninger said.

And that means analytics can be better connected with applications from the beginning. The concept should be easier to understand tomorrow at VentureBeat’s DevBeat conference in San Francisco, when Hulya Farinas, a Pivotal data scientist, will talk about how data science can help developers build better applications.

Pivotal chief executive Paul Maritz’s comments back in April about “a third-generation platform” now make more sense. This is more than a mere platform for developing applications. Think of it as a full-fledged system that emphasizes the needs of applications and analysts.

The question is whether lots of companies will be convinced that Cloud Foundry’s system will be more useful than what already works now.

Editor’s note: Our upcoming DataBeat/Data Science Summit, Dec. 4-Dec. 5 in Redwood City, will focus on the most compelling opportunities for businesses in the area of big data analytics and data science. Register today!

]]>0Pivotal launches its enterprise cloud platform with big data tools to run on itHow VMWare will structure its new semi-autonomous cloud unithttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/03/vmware-cloud-unit/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/03/vmware-cloud-unit/#commentsMon, 03 Dec 2012 16:51:49 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=583044Sources confirm that EMC and VMWare will be putting their cloud-related businesses, including Cloud Foundry, into a new unit led by Paul Maritz. It will not be an independent company, however.
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EMC and VMware will announce a semi-autonomous business unit dedicated to cloud services this week, a well-placed source has told me.

The unit, to be managed from within EMC at first, will combine some assets from the parent company along with some from VMware, a company that EMC is a majority shareholder of.

EMC plans the announcement for Tuesday, December 4, according to my source.

EMC declined to comment for this article, and VMware chief technical officer Stephen Herrod gave a resounding “no comment” when I asked him what the rumors would mean for his company.

My source tells me the makeup of the new unit will be close to what GigaOm suggested in the initial scoop. The unit will essentially roll up all the different cloud infrastructure and platform offerings from both VMware and EMC including:

Cloud Foundry, an open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) project initiated by VMware but with a significant ecosystem of third-party companies building products on top of it. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Appsecute, a PaaS management layer that includes support for Cloud Foundry-based PaaS.)

My source tells me that, as many industry insiders expected, the new unit will be run by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz and that Maritz has, since he stepped down from the CEO role, been working behind the scenes on the strategy for the new unit.

Let’s call it “VMCloud” for now, though we don’t know for sure what EMC will call the new unit.

Contrary to initial thoughts, I am led to believe that the new unit will not be a standalone company but rather a composition of different parts, run out of EMC. It appears the plan is to consolidate the different components in the short to medium term and spin it out as a standalone company thereafter. Part of the reason to keep it within EMC in the initial stages is to help minimize the pain of separating out the different units. I am told there is some staff culling involved in the process.

While the move isn’t at all unexpected, it is a surprise that the new unit looks set to remain within the mothership. Much of the reason for dividing the cloud components off is the tension created by the new businesses, which are somewhat disruptive to the traditional revenue streams of both VMware and EMC. Putting them in an autonomous separate company would give the cloud components more leeway to pursue their own business, independent from interference.

There have also been concerns from customers and partners of the cloud units about the intentions of both EMC and VMware. As an example of this, many partners within the Cloud Foundry ecosystem have told me of their anxiety about the intentions of VMware when it comes to the open source PaaS. While they’re excited about the opportunity the initiative brings, they are also mindful of the potential for VMware to act in a manner at odds with the aims of the community. Neither VMware nor EMC are well-known as organizations quick to embrace an “open” style of business.

In my view, the new business, as it looks likely to be constituted, doesn’t go far enough to really give it the ability to stand on its own two feet.

Earlier this year I wrote an opinion piece after the first rumors of the new company were scooped by GigaOm. In my piece I suggested that it would take a complete severing of the connection between VMware/EMC and the cloud business units (Cloud Foundry, Greenplum. and Rubicon) to remove the barriers to further success for the individual units. This is true for several reasons:

The companies’ traditional businesses are highly lucrative but are being eroded by cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services

A more compelling cloud story would create a situation is created that is toxic to its high margin businesses as above

As a peripheral issue, VMware’s application assets are disconnected, disjointed, and largely irrelevant

VMware has a vibrant growing ecosystem around CloudFoundry, but PaaS adds confusion to the existing business and a potential cloud-specific future business

In my view, the initiative should be seen as an opportunity to review the whole of both VMware’s and EMC’s businesses. As such they should not only spin out the cloud units together as an independent entity but also take further, bolder steps. Here’s what I think EMC and VMWare need to do:

Ditch the niche applications – VMware has, in the past few years, acquired a number of cloud application companies. Sliderocket, Zimbra, and Socialcast are disconnected from what the company does and hence are a distraction from the core business. My advice is to flick off Sliderocket and Zimbra and make an assessment on whether Socialcast can be folded in as a fabric quickly and easily.

Understand that the future is heterogeneity – Create a standalone entity that is focused on cloud infrastructure – include infrastructure management business DynamicOps in with this and direct the existing infrastructure business to “play nicely” with the new unit. The new business can be a stellar vendor of public and private cloud technologies, and the DynamicOps inclusion can mean that the products have a compelling story when seen alongside customer use of existing VMware products and services. In doing so, VMware disrupts the IT management and service provision space before other players are able to do so themselves.

Go hybrid - Microsoft has signaled it is finally going to play a compelling game in the hybrid cloud space. I’m predicting an expansion of the “private Azure” play well beyond service providers. If VMware decides that it wants to keep all of its infrastructure business together, then it has to do the right thing and forego some short-term hyper-profit for long-term stability. It needs to provide DynamicOps to customers as an accessible and open turnkey solution to bring together all their assets (physical, virtual, public, and private) under one pane of glass and make sure that it incentivizes its salespeople to effect the move – it’s going to be hard but some kind of quota system that mandates lower margin but longer-term cloud sales is going to be necessary.

Let PaaS shine – The biggest barrier to Cloud Foundry hitting it out of the park (beyond customer confusion about what PaaS actually is, of course) is the uncertainty around VMware’s intentions. A cloud unit where both infrastructure and platform product are built with a view to openness would help reduce the concerns of the community.

The individual business units have much potential but, as is often the case, it is only through a logical and consistent mix of products that they can be successful.

VMware and EMC have a big opportunity to build an exceptionally compelling business that could be very competitive in the new cloud world, but it’ll take courage and conviction to make the big decisions that are needed for this to occur.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, investor, commentator, and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity, and agility, all enabled by the cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. You can follow Ben on Twitter.

]]>0How VMWare will structure its new semi-autonomous cloud unitRumors: VMWare planning Cloud Foundry spinoff led by Paul Maritzhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/02/rumors-vmware-spinoff/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/02/rumors-vmware-spinoff/#commentsSun, 02 Dec 2012 20:15:56 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=582999VMWare is planning to spin off Cloud Foundry and a number of its other products into a separate division owned by corporate parent EMC.
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Paul Maritz, the former chief executive of VMWare, will head the new unit, the reports say.

The new unit will include Cloud Foundry, plus SpringSource, Gemstone, and EMC’s “big data” product, Greenplum, reports say. This would give EMC a more dedicated unit to compete with other cloud service providers, most notably the industry leaders, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. It would also allow VMWare to concentrate on its core business of server virtualization.

The rumors are an update to rumors reported in July, 2012, by GigaOm, which suggested that VMWare was about to spin off Cloud Foundry together with Greenplum and Project Rubicon, an infrastructure-as-a-service product. The new spinoff plans appear to be somewhat different, suggesting that EMC’s plans have evolved.

Maritz, a former top Microsoft executive, was the CEO of VMWare from 2008 until September 1, 2012, when former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger replaced him. Interestingly, Maritz announced his departure as CEO around the same time as the first set of rumors about a VMWare spinoff.

]]>1Rumors: VMWare planning Cloud Foundry spinoff led by Paul MaritzBox.net unveils the Box Innovation Network to spark imaginative enterprise developmenthttp://venturebeat.com/2011/11/17/box-net-unveils-the-box-innovation-network-to-spark-imaginative-enterprise-development/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/17/box-net-unveils-the-box-innovation-network-to-spark-imaginative-enterprise-development/#commentsThu, 17 Nov 2011 16:55:20 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=352449Box.net, which provides cloud storage services for the enterprise, announced its third-party developer network today, called the Box Innovation Network, or /bin. Enterprise apps may not be the sexiest market segment for developers, but these are apps that the biggest, most influential companies in the world could use. Because these companies are so big, they […]
]]>Box.net, which provides cloud storage services for the enterprise, announced its third-party developer network today, called the Box Innovation Network, or /bin.

Enterprise apps may not be the sexiest market segment for developers, but these are apps that the biggest, most influential companies in the world could use. Because these companies are so big, they have big needs, which can make for daunting projects. Developing for smaller companies may provide more freedom and be less impacted by regulations. Enterprise apps, on the other hand, tend to show less imagination.

“The state of innovation in enterprise software feels very, very stilted,” said Chris Yeh, Box.net’s vice president of platform, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of great innovation.”

Box.net is part of the growing “cloud” trend, which uses the Internet to provide software and infrastructure that companies would otherwise have to build out and host themselves. In particular, Box is a competitor of Dropbox, which allows people to store files on a remote server, accessible to anyone with permissions to enter that folder, by computer or mobile device. Enterprises are quickly recognizing the benefits of this kind of document availability and ease of sharing. In fact, Box says 77 percent of Fortune 500 companies have already deployed its solutions in their companies. Though, in keeping with the pace of large corporations, the deployment has mainly been seen across individual departments.

Box hopes the developer network will tackle a few key elements missing in the Box product today, including improved security options for administrators, expanded capabilities in the file sharing itself, as well as vertical-specific customizations for Box.

Currently, Box lets you view over 100 different file types, but as Yeh points out, there’s increasing demand for capabilities in, say, doctor’s offices to show patients a cat scan on an iPad. This leads Box developers to vertical packaging, such as a Box product tailored to a law office for sharing mortgage paperwork, or pharmaceutical company needing drug information.

Box’s developer community currently totals around 4,500. “We have quite a bit of momentum on [the developer] side of the business,” said Yeh. “API [application programming interface] keys are growing at about four times [what] they were last year.”

The company didn’t want to throw resources at developers without any external help, however, so it launched /bin with a number of strategic partners including Heroku, Rackspace, Cloud Foundry (a division of VMWare), Appcelerator, SnapLogic, and Twilio. All of these companies are providing their own tools for developers to work with in addition to Box’s APIs and other resources.

Telecommunications API provider Twilio, for example, has already worked with Box through a joint competition that created The Interviewer. This allows a person to set up an interview call, enter each involved person’s credentials and the time and date of the call. Twilio would then make the call, record the interview, and store the transcript on Box for the hiring decision-maker to access.

“[Enterprise development] isn’t sexy and we don’t really know what people will build,” said Danielle Morrill, director of marketing for Twilio, in an interview with VentureBeat. “But Box has a huge user base, so if we can help developers find a magical tool that users love, we could see another GroupMe [a Twilio-based group messaging app recently purchased by Skype]. I certainly hope we will.”

With today’s announcement, Box is also announcing a $2 million fund to get the program up and running.

“Our intent was not to create an open forum that anybody could get into without any support, ‘Here’s the API, go knock yourself out,'” said Yeh. “There are some people that we really do want to invest in and work with.”

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!